Is social media toxic?
A Chinese girl talking about social media
Hi whoever is reading this, this is my first blog, welcome welcome.
In case you want to learn more about me, I am a designer based in New York currently working at a startup, with my background in digital interactive art. I soaked in art and design for almost half of my life. Until this year, I started to care more about things happening in the world, I want to have a deeper and broader perspective.
‘Is social media toxic?’
This question has been in my head for quite a while after knowing people who completely don’t use social media and are living pretty good which really impressed me and made me question the presence of social media in my life.
As a young female grew up with the age of social media, who was born and raised in in China and lived two years in America, the world’s two biggest economies, I experienced frustrating comparison and two different ways of manipulation.
‘I am not cool at all’
Social media unconsciously slipped and expanded into my life since I was 13. Even though middle school me already felt small in front of the branded posts, it’s not until undergrad that social media frustrated me, as it was the first time I experienced social polarization. Social media made me feel frustrated for having an ordinary face and living an ordinary life. The stress almost made me anti social that I avoid bumping into any friends if I didn’t look like my branded posts. The more I tried to keep up and be cool on social media, the more upset and hollow I felt.
Why can social media easily make the young generation depressed over meaningless trivial things, holding back their energy that is supposed to deal with bigger things?
I think for the teenagers, they are still establishing their values and at an age to have the eager to show their uniqueness or rebellion in a cool way. In current materialism society, being cool can take a good amount of money, where the comparison and anxiety spring.
Comparison is indeed a thief of happiness, social media can bring out some of the worst parts of our humanity — jealousy and greed.
‘I want more attention!’
‘Give me more likes!’
At some point, I unconsciously posted a lot in my Wechat timeline, I didn’t realize I was looking for attention. This was not rare in chinese society even until now(at least in my social circle), I think it comes from our one-child policy. When my generation started to move out, we lose the great amount of attention from our parents. All of a sudden, we can’t accept no one cares about us at all. This is my perspective for Chinese social media perspective. Though the phenomenon is the same in American social media where multi children policy is implemented. I also believe it’s based on our keen psychological need as a human — to prove that we deserve to be loved. Once we are obsessed with pursuing that, any not satisfied desire will seduce our brain to unconsciously insert the idea of ‘we don’t deserve love’. Of course, no brain can willingly embrace such a brutal idea, so the negative circle begins with the side effect of frustration — keep posting and waiting for likes. Will this cultivate a short term dopamine react system to our brain? I think the answer is yes. When I see people liking my posts, I take that equally as being liked in real life especially during the pandemic, so no wonder I get dopamine, since human is a social animal.
This is also the point where profiteering comes in. Being obsessed with attention means being more active and spending more time comparing with normal users who take social media as a tool. Now with help of mass advanced technology, the business model treats me as a raw material and can manage to collect tons of data to profile me and render a rough idea of my preference, then it’s the game time to test what works and what doesn’t which simulates a large pool for advertisers. Manipulation is a big word, but I definitely fell for that trick few times. As a designer, I should say, I feel guilty when contributing to the attention economy. I design illustration and animation to make product sticky and gain more user engagement, as a not-so-advanced-algorithm collaborating with machines.
I’m recently reading <the age of surveillance capitalism> by Shoshana Zuboff. I think surveillance capitalism as a future result of mass data collection and trade over large user base platforms, when discussing the need of its regulation, it’s also a discussion of how elementary human rights will accommodate in future age of information industry.
In China, the Chinese version of twitter — weibo serves as a platform for delivering the most up to date news and it takes the place as a mainstream for young people to get access to the news. When I was in my undergrad, the hot lines were filled with news from the entertainment industry. As a result, following celebrity gossip or scandal unconsciously became our daily routine. For me as a normal college student was blinded and didn’t care what’s happening in the outside world, especially I was never taught how to follow news properly. I never noticed this after I came to America, I was surprised that celebrities has much less dominant impact. I avoid being conspiratorial or cynical taking this as a intentional tactic, but this is definately not good.
However, social media has a different appearance in America,
